What’s Up for 2023?
A lot of people are predicting a recession and hard times. Canada’s Prime Minister says things could be tough. As a man who says he prefers to think about family policy rather than monetary policy, that could be a sign that things will turn up.
No one can predict the future. We have just seen the worst stock market year since 2008. By March of 2009, things were rosy again, if not in the economy, then in the market. The stock market is not the economy, but it often predicts what is going to happen.
Economic thinker Hubert Marleau says there is a 25% chance of stagflation, that is when interest rates stay high and the economy stagnates. He is too clever to make any hard predictions. He does mint out in this week’s newsletter that Wall Street heavyweights think the United States could avoid a recession.
Interestingly, Goldman Sachs (GS), an investment bank not to be trifled with, is betting against the crowd. So is Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse. In a note to their clients, GS wrote: “Our most out-of-consensus forecast for 2023 is our call that the US will avoid a recession and instead continue progressing toward a soft landing. Part of our disagreement with consensus arises from 0ur more optimistic view on whether a recession is necessary to tame inflation.”
Maybe the United States and Canada will skate onside, but it’s hard to think Europe and especially Britain will avoid a bleak New Year.
Note: Make my New Year by upgrading from a free to paid subscription.
Some Obits I wrote in 2022, with the first paragraph of each.
Harry Steele, who has died at the age of 92, started his business career late in life, after more than 20 years as an officer in the Royal Canadian Navy. He retired in 1974 as a Lieutenant Commander, and his business colleagues always referred to him as The Commander.
Catherine Steele, who has died at the age of 91, was as responsible for her husband Harry Steele’s success as he was. Mr. Steele, who died earlier this year, was one of Newfoundland’s most successful entrepreneurs, after a career as a naval officer. Catherine Steele’s early forays into real estate, along with Harry's success in the stock market, paved the way for their joint business success.
Gerald Potterton was an animator who did some of the work on the Beatles film Yellow Submarine, director of the Ivan Reitman cult film Heavy Metal, and a writer and producer whose work was nominated for three Academy Awards. Mr. Potterton, who has died at 91, did almost all his creative work after he moved to Montreal from England in 1954, where he started his career at the National Film Board, a once powerful government-owned production studio whose star has since faded.
Bridget Gregson's (Lawson) teenage years were shaped by the war, first as a 15-year-old English schoolgirl evacuated from her boarding school in southern England and sent to Canada for safety. Her three younger siblings came with her to Canada. Three years later, she graduated from high school and joined the Royal Canadian Navy. She was sent to Halifax, where she worked as a decoder, and in May of 1945, she and a colleague saw the message sent to German U-boat crews to surface and surrender to the nearest Allied port.
Charles Juravinski, who has died at the age of 92, was born in poverty and didn't finish much school, but he and his wife donated more than $160-million to health care research in the Hamilton area. The source of his wealth was a racetrack near Hamilton, Ontario —he founded and ran the Flamboro Downs racetrack in the 1970s and sold to Frank Stronach in 2002.
Gisèle Lalonde, who has died at the age of 89, was a schoolteacher, activist and mayor of Vanier, Ontario, who changed life for the better for Francophones in Ottawa and across the province. She was best known for leading the fight to save the Montfort, a French-language hospital in Ottawa.
Jean de Grandpré, who died 52 days shy of his 101st birthday, was chief executive and chairman of BCE, the parent company of Bell Canada, effectively running the biggest company in Canada for more than 20 years. Mr. de Grandpré was on the vanguard of French-speaking business executives who were replacing the old anglo-Montreal elite.
Peter Robinson lived in Toronto, but Inspector Alan Banks, the main character in his 25 novels, lived in the fictional town of Eastvale in Yorkshire. His books were regularly on the Sunday Times bestseller lists, and his Inspector Banks novels were translated into a television program that ran from 2010 to 2016.
Michael Sweeney was a top news and documentary cameraman who won a Gemini for Children of Darkness, a film on the famine and child slavery in Sudan; he was also the director of photography and principal cameraman on the CBC series Canada: A People's History.
Kenneth Baird, a brilliant scientist, polymath and inventor who has died at the age of 99, accomplished so much in his long life that it is hard to know what to list first. Perhaps his greatest achievement was using lasers with his team at the National Research Council in Ottawa to help set a new international standard for the length of a metre.
Patrick Watson was perhaps the most famous Canadian broadcaster of the 1960s, the star of This Hour Has Seven Days, a program so popular with viewers that it had a bigger audience than Hockey Night in Canada. It was also far too edgy for the grey suits of the CBC, who cancelled it a little less than two years after it began.
Kenneth Welsh was a classical actor, who knew Shakespeare so well that he could recite almost any scene on command. It was usually a charity trick. Someone in the audience would say Lady Macbeth, Act 5 Scene 1, and he would recite it word for word. Say a few words from another scene and he would finish it.
Canada Needs a Transport Czar
First, they should fire the Minister of Transport, an unknown cipher from Mississauga, send him to the backbenches forever and then pension off Michael Keenan, the Deputy Minister of Transport and several of his underlings. Keenan’s bio says he worked in Environment and Sustainability. Theory, not hard reality.
Canadian airports, a federal responsibility, are in total chaos. Hard reality.
Ditto for railways.
A tree fell on a Via Rail passenger train and people were stuck on it for 18 hours. What kind of railway has trees on its right-of-way? Ever been to Europe and seen where the TGV runs? Detail, not theory.
Next put someone tough in charge of Transport. I don’t particularly like Chrystia Freeland but she can be tough and she’s smart. Enough of the touchy-feely crap. Fire the top people at airports. Fine the airlines for a selling too many tickets. Take away the licences of cheapo charter airlines that strand people in Mexico and the Dominican Republic.
Canada is a first world country operating like a third world country. Imagine if you had a guy like the late Harry Steele running things? See this week’s essay.
Juggling Two or Three Jobs from Home
A friend of mine fired someone late last year because he was convinced the new hire was working at least two jobs and maybe more. This is a phenomenon born of the work from home craze that lingers on long after the pandemic is over. The union representing Canadian civil servants is balking at the order to return to work three days a week.
Clever people with quick digital reflexes can manage two or three jobs at once. They can even juggle two Zoom calls at the same time. The mute button, for both audio and video makes it that much easier.
There are some signs that an employee is on the remote fiddle. He or she is probably a recent hire. They probably keep a low profile, staying quiet at online meetings. They also might miss a lot of meetings and take a long time to answer questions.
People holding multiple jobs tend to hand in poor work and send it late. They take a lot of sick leave.
If you think someone is doing this, one quick way to thwart them is ask them to come to the office. And make it a full day for several days in a row.
There is even a website that tells people how to work two jobs. It is called: Overemployed. Its headline: Work Two Remote Jobs, Reach Financial Freedom
Click on this” The site that tells you how to work multiple jobs.
Electric Car Nightmare: A six-hour lineup for Tesla chargers in Britain
Essay of the Week
This is the latest chapter from my book on Harry Steele.
Chapter Nine
The Pilots’ Strike
Overdressed, oversexed, overpaid bus drivers.
— A quote about EPA pilots often attributed to Harry Steele but in fact spoken by an EPAboard member.
There was no greater test of the mettle of Harry Steele than the pilot’s strike at Eastern Provincial Airways. It was a battle fought first at the negotiating table, then in the media, and finally on the front lines of EPA’s operations. The pilots were members of CALPA, the Canadians Airline Pilots Association. It was a strong union and had won many battles over the years, in particular with Air Canada, which had caved in to demands and short strikes over the years.
Takey is a Harry Steele word. It is not in the Oxford English Dictionary, but Harry offers a clear definition for it: a takey is someone who wants more than their share and digs in to get it. He saw the pilots’ union as a bunch of takeys.
Harry wanted the pilots to fly more hours; the union said that its members would only agree to do so if the company agreed to a set of demands put forward by them. Harry Steele decided he would not give in. When it was reported that he called the pilots “glorified bus drivers” — though he denied he was the one who said it — the union stepped up its war of words. They underestimated their adversary. The man from Musgrave Harbour was not for turning.
Every reporter who covered the EPA strike latched on to the bus driver story. It immediately portrayed Harry Steele as the callous boss ridiculing his striking employees. But it might have struck a chord with the public who knew airline pilots were making more than double the average wage and then some.
The reality is Harry never said it. In an article written by David Napier in 1996, Harry went out of his way to deny the legend. Napier describes the meeting at Harry’s office: “It’s not that I am trying to run away from those words, it’s just that I didn’t say them,” says Steele, as he bellows to his assistant, “Veronica! Get me the overdressed, oversexed busdriver file.”
Moments later, Steele is pulling newspaper clippings from a manila folder that prove he never dubbed striking airlinepilots at his old company, Eastern Provincial Airways, a bunch of “overdressed, oversexed, overpaid bus drivers.” It sounds like something the outspoken Steele, who has had more than his share of union dust-ups, would say but the words weren’t his; EPA board member Jean Claude Hebert uttered the infamous phrase that brought negotiations with the pilots’ union to a fever pitch back in 1983. The comment, however, has now become entrenched in Steele legend.
Here is a public notice put out by the company, under the photograph and signature of H.R. Steele, president and chief executive officer. It explains the situation in clear, direct language:
The Eastern Provincial Pilots’ Strike
On January 27th, 1983 when the Management of Eastern Provincial put a two-year offer to its jet pilots of an increase of 14.6 percent along with a request which would have increased hard flying hours from an average of 51 per month to 55 per month, the Company’s CALPA pilots stopped work and went on strike.
The increase in hard flying hours requested by the company is far below the Department of Transport limits of 120 hours.
It was intended by CALPA that the strike action of January 27th would shut down the Airline and cut off services to places like Labrador, [the] Magdalen Islands, and St. Pierre and Miquelon, whose residents depend entirely upon the airline for transportation. They thought the shutdown would raise such a public outcry andput such financial pressure on the Airline that, at any cost to the public and the Company, we would be forced to accede to their demands.
Instead of accepting this shutdown, we informed CALPA that:
Long range survival of the Airline required improved pilot productivity, during the strike we would operate the airline, and if the strike were protracted, we would hire new pilots.
One month after the strike had begun, with 40 percent of the schedule in operation, the Company began the process of carefully selecting and hiring new pilots. As of today, May 2nd, this process continues. Scheduled operations have reached 70 percent of normal and new pilots are on the payroll. We expect to fly 100 percent of the schedule by summer.
CALPA now wants us to get rid of the new pilots. Our position is, they came to us in good faith to carry out our obligation to satisfy public convenience and necessity as required by our licences. They have lived up to their end of the bargain, and we will live up to ours.
A Philosophy of Work
Newfoundland Capital Corporation continues to stand behind the following philosophy of work for the employees of all its Divisions.
Our obligation to protect jobs for all employees imposes a requirement not to accede to inordinate demands of some employees.
The airline industry is in serious trouble and will continue in serious trouble until airline fares and airline costs fall to the level which the public is willing to pay. Costs can be lowered either by layoffs or by increased productivity. The Company will stress productivity because it has the minimum cost and the maximum benefit for everybody, the public, the shareholders, all employees, including our pilots.
That was one side of the story. The pilots looked at things another way. You could argue that the pilots were winning the media war, in the local press and on national television. Here are two examples, the first from Jo Ann Napier’s article “Strikers Have ‘Drawn the Line,’” published in the February 3, 1983, edition of the Halifax Chronicle Herald.
“Safety aboard Eastern Provincial Airways (EPA) flights could be compromised by union acceptance ofmanagement proposals,” the spokesman for striking EPA pilots said Wednesday.
During a press conference in Halifax, Captain Keith Lacey said the 92 pilots who went on strike Jan. 26 have “drawn the line” with contract concessions over working hours, daily duty times, and rest periods. The news conference followed announcements that EPA has contracted out pilots and equipment from Austin Airways of Timmins, Ont., to handle “essential” flight services.
“You don’t hold the pilot profession up for ransom just because times are hard,” said Capt. Lacey, adding that striking members of the Canadian Air Lines Pilot Association (CALPA) will not waver in their bargaining stance.
“It is the passengers who have been held hostage by CALPA,” countered EPA spokesman Merv Russell, during a telephone interview from Gander, Nfld.
He suggested EPA clientele who rely on the “essential” services provided by the regional [airline] were placed in a difficult position by the pilots’ strike. Mr. Russell noted that management opted for a “moderate stance” in the dispute by contracting out, rather than hiring, the Austin Airways pilots.
He disagreed with suggestions that safety standards may be threatened by the company’s proposal to increase EPA pilots credited flying time from 80 to 85 hours per month.
“Eighty-five hours per month is certainly safe,” said Mr. Russell, adding that pilots at Nordair carry that workload, which is within Ministry of Transport guidelines.
But the union spokesman said the company proposal is “just a case of asking for too much, too soon. There are some limits, and we’ve reached most of those limits,” said Capt. Lacey.
Regarding EPA’s move to bring in outside pilots, Capt. Lacey said it is “unfortunate” the company deemed it necessary to bring in outside people rather [than] try to settle the dispute.
EPA has contracted Austin Airways to pilot three flight routes and to provided its own Hawker Siddeley 748 turboprop airplanes for one of those flights — from Montreal to the northern New Brunswick towns of Chatham and Charlo.
On March 31, 1983, Harry Steele and Keith Lacey went toe to toe on The Journal, a nightly television program that aired after The National. (The author worked on The Journal at the time.) What follows is an exact transcript of that interview. HS is Harry Steele; KL is Keith Lacey; PK is Peter Kent; and MF, Mary Lou Finlay, the main interviewer.
MF: Five weeks ago pilots at Eastern Provincial Airways went on strike cutting Atlantic services in half. The labour dispute has degenerated into charges, count- er-charges, name-calling and rebuttals in newspaper advertisements. What’s surprising about the bitterness of this strike is that the two sides never seem to be too far apart.
PK: With no settlement in sight, Eastern Provincial Airways took matters into its own hands this week hiring pilots to replace those on strike.
[Video showing strikers hitting Tilden rental van with hammers and axes: “C’mon, you bunch of scabs.”]
PK: The first eight pilots arrived for work in Halifax where they were met by picketing EPA employees. EPA’s high-flying, free-enterprise boss, Harry Steele, says the pilots hired through the strike will stay with EPA and that those still on strike will have to take their chances of finding jobs when the strike is over. The central issue in the strike is productivity. The company wants to increase the number of hours the pilots fly from eighty to eighty-five hours a month and to reduce time between flights.
In the fight for public sympathy, both sides took their case to the public with newspaper ads. The company took out this one, which says pilots are only working fifteen days a month and the company isasking for just one more day’s work.
The man behind Eastern Provincial Airways is Harry Steele. He took over the perennial money loser fiveyears ago and turned the carrier around to record a profit last year. The pilots argue that the profit column shows the airline is already more productive than most and while the pilots have shown a willingness to be flexible, Harry Steele hasn’t given an inch.
MF: In an attempt to end the strike the pilots have said that they are willing to go back to work under the old contract. That offer was rejected by the company. We have linked the two sides in this dispute: Harry Steele is president of EPA and Captain Keith Lacey is a captain who has flown for fourteen years and is head of its Pilots Association.
Mr. Steele, the pilots have said they are willing to go back to work for you, with no increases. Why won’t you take them back?
HS: The issue, Mary Lou, is one of productivity. We must have eighty-five hours a month, and if the pilots want to give us eighty-five hours a month, we’ll take them back.
MF: Captain Lacey, why did you reject that demand from your company?
KL: We didn’t reject that demand from the company. At no time did we reject that demand and I’d say to Mr. Steele right now that if all he wants is eighty-five hours a month over our old contract, I will give it to him right here and now on television. He can have his eighty-five hours over the old contract with no other changes. I will stand by my word and give him his eighty-five hours with no other changes in our old contract. I say that now, and I mean it.
MF: Mr. Steele?
HS: Yes, well the contract is very thick and there’s more than one issue. We need the eighty-five hours, and I can’t say to Captain Lacey we’re going to take out everything else, but that’s the crux of the matter.
MF: Captain Lacey has said you can have it, so what’s keeping you apart?
HS: Yes, but Captain Lacey has said that a few times before but I’ve not seen him offer it. What he’s offering inthe latest proposal is something less than eighty-five hours.
KL: I’d like to cut in right there … that’s not right, Mr. Steele, and you know it. I’ve offered you eighty-five hours several times in different forms. You say you want eighty-five hours. That’s not an increase of five hours, it’s an increase of ten hours in some months, and we’ve offered you just now in the latest offer eighty-five hours per month; we offered it to you in a newspaper ad, and we’re offering it to you again. If the old contract wasn’t good enough for you and all you want is eighty-five hours flying per month on the jet with the salary you give us and that’s your figure, … then I ask you ‘you have it.’ Why are we not back to work?
HS: The fact of the matter is that as I understand it, Captain Lacey, you have not offered the eighty-five hours and if you’ve got that to offer you had better go back to your committee and negotiate with them, I’m sure they will give it to you. That is the fundamental issue is eighty-five hours. There may be other considerations.
KL: The fact is that the company is leading everybody to believe … it’s not the major issue. The company isleading everyone, the public included, and the pilots that the only problem here is five more hours of work. You put a very expensive ad in the newspaper, and we answered it: We accept, the issue is now settled. But it’s not settled.
MF: Captain Lacey, what do you think are the other demands that the company won’t talk about?
KL: The company has made a long list of demands. They gave them to us on the fifteenth of October, and we still have them. They have totally ignored any proposals we have put on the table. They have them, and they still have them.
MF: What are the other demands and what are the things you object to?
KL: We object to the company wanting to increase their supervisory pilots to a number that they so designate.They want to increase our landings, and they want to increase our duty period and decrease our rest periods. The whole issue that they want … And they chalk it all up to five more hours of work.
MF: Mr. Steele, it seems as though there is more to this than just the eighty-five hours a month.
HS: Sure there are other things when people work, there’s more to it than salary and hours, and that is the contentious issue is one of productivity. The fact of the matter is that people should be working more than two weeks a month. I think that eighty-five hours … and that’s not “hard time,” that’s “credited time,” so it only works out to about fifty hours a month actually flying.
MF: I’m really confused here now because you say that is the main issue, the crux of the whole thing, and we hear Captain Lacey saying “You can have that.” Yet nothing is happening.
HS: Well, Captain Lacey has offered that before and I —
KL: It was offered before, and it was offered in good faith, and it still is.
HS: You’ve only offered it, Captain Lacey, on radio and television, and your latest proposal as I understand it now … did you offer eighty-five hours in your proposal today?
KL: I most certainly did so.
HS: You did? Well, that’s not my understanding.
KL: The whole thing has gotten a little bit “low” here with different press releases and company releases and pilots being referred to as everything from bus drivers to technicians. We have offered this company — Mr.Steele says that his only problem is productivity and the shareholders and we have our careers here, our lives. We have devoted as much to this airline and have as much invested in it as Mr. Steele does.
MF: If I’m not misreading you, Mr. Lacey, I think you’re saying now, and you’ve said before, that you didn’t think the company really wanted to negotiate. Let me put that to Mr. Steele: Do you want to settle this?
HS: Yes, we do want to settle. We want Captain Lacey and all of his pilots back, and we want them back very badly.
MF: Mr. Steele, if that eighty-five hours a month is on the table, is this over?
HS: Well, if it’s on the table, as far as I’m concerned it’s over because if these other things that he addressed are looked after as well. But the major stumbling block, as I understand it, is the eighty-five hours, and unless weget eighty-five hours for $83,741 a year for the captains, there will be no settlement.
MF: Captain Lacey, is that eighty-five hours a month on the table?
KL: It was interesting just then to hear Mr. Steele say, “If the eighty-five hours is the major stumbling block.” And then he said, “In addition to all the other things.” Mr. Steele knows the eighty-five hours is the major stumblingblock because I’ve just given him all the other things. He knew that this afternoon.
MF: Okay, is the eighty-five on the table?
KL: It’s on the table, but it’s not on the table with all the other things, no.
HS: Well, is it there or isn’t it? Is the eighty-five hours on the table?
KL: If that’s the only thing you want….
HS: Is it there?
KL: It’s not there with all the other things you want, no. HS: Okay, well then I suggest to you that it’s not there.KL: It most certainly is so there.
MF: Gentlemen, I thank you both for this. It sounds as though you’re not that far apart. I may be inexperienced,but I look forward to this in the next day or two.
HS: Yes, I do too.
The consensus is that Harry Steele lost that battle. Keith Lacey was more at home on television, and it showed, maybe not in the transcript of the interview, but certainly on the screen. That was a battle in a long war that in the end the company won, and the union lost.
Rex Murphy, no stranger to television, worked as a reporter in Newfoundland at the time of the strike. He says Harry Steele is “tough as a nail.” “Harry went through the picket line every single day. The idea that you could physically or morally blackmail him was never going to be,” says Rex. He says Harry had too much to lose to give in. “Everything was hanging by a thread; he had a family, and he had borrowed to get The Albatross and then he ends up with this EPA airline from the Crosbie bankruptcies. Nothing was easy.”
More than a dozen years later, Keith Lacey was interviewed by David Napier about life with Harry. Though the two men were fierce opponents at the time, Lacey was surprisingly laid back.
“I like Steele and enjoyed being around him,” says Captain Keith Lacey, who represented the Canadian Air Line Pilots’ Association (CALPA) during the 1983 strike at EPA. However, Lacey adds that Steele’s“militaristic style” often meant that senior recruits to the East Coast airline “weren’t sure if they were joining the Forces or EPA management.” And below the executive level, unionized employees were worried not only about future changes in an industry that was due to deregulate but about what they perceived as their boss’s anti-union attitude.
Well, maybe Lacey harboured a touch of bitterness.
John French was a pilot with EPA who defied the union and kept flying throughout the strike. He started flying for EPA in Greenland in the early 1960s and then went to work with them on the mainland in 1966. French’s long history with the airline was part of the reason he defied the union and worked during the strike.
French first met Harry a short time after the Steeles bought The Albatross Hotel. “We used to spend a lot of time therewhen we were on layovers, and I would see him there having breakfast. EPA was very small, and we would see him, or the previous presi- dent, Keith Miller, and we were almost on a first-name basis being such a small company.”
John French was involved with the union at Eastern Provincial and at one point was the union local president. But his relationship with the union changed when the strike began. “It was a very difficult time. I wasn’t involved in an executive capacity, but when the strike occurred I think the union went out for about a month, which I supported without any question whatsoever. As they stayed out, it became obvious that Harry couldn’t keep the airline going under that situation, so he told the union that he was going to bring in outside workers to fly the airplanes. There was no doubt in my mind that he was serious and that, if he did it, things were only going to get worse.
“I advised the union leadership that, after a month, it was time to bring the membership back to work before that happened and live to fight another day but, of course, my advice was not taken. The union leadership had very different views of it. So I told them that I disagreed with their position on that issue and that if they continued to insist on keeping the membership out that would be a decision that I could not support and I would have no choice but to resign mymembership in the union and go back to work, which is what I did. I want to make it perfectly clear that the decision was made by my wife and me and not with Harry or any of the EPA management whatsoever.
“That strike turned into one of the bitterest strikes in the history of Canadian labour. Friendships were lost; I had best friends there who never spoke to me again. It was very bitter, and there’s nothing good that can be said about it. I want to make it perfectly clear that both sides were to blame for it: Harry and the EPA management were wrong to bring in outside workers, and I think that he grossly underestimated the [resolve of the] union, and I think the union was just as wrong in underestimating him and his management team. It was just a situation where both were at loggerheads, and I guess no compromise was going to be made and it was all very sad.
“There were a number of court cases, and the courts ruled that Harry was justified in bringing the outside workers in, and another court overturned that. It was the end of EPA, and there were certainly no winners, with the possible exception of Harry, who was a winner financially because he ended up selling the airline for a sizeable profit. But there were no real winners; families were torn apart, and it was just a bad scene.”
John stayed in touch with Harry Steele, who always remembered him. “Harry told me after the strike that if there was anything he could ever do for me not to hesitate to ask him. I took him up on that offer, and he kept his word. He was very kind and generous to my late wife, Estelle, and me, and in that regard, I have nothing but good to say about him. I have a winter home in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and have made some very good friends there and once I invited a couple of my friends up to Canada for the first time and I asked Harry if there was any chance of taking them to his fishing camp and there were no questions asked.”
Eventually, CP Air bought Eastern Provincial. That deal was a building block for expansion and growth. The family reaction was surprising.
“I think there was a great relief in the family. Obviously financially it worked out very well but, for me being very young at that point, it was one of the happiest days of my life because at that time we had gone through a long period of financial uncertainty plus incredibly bitter labour strikes and living in a small town it was tough,” says John Steele.
You might think people at school would have picked on him during the strike, but that was not the case. “Everybody at high school always treated me very well. Later at (Memorial) university you’d have somebody who the odd time might say something to you, but within the town of Gander itself, I have to say that it was not a problem. You had people whose parents were out on strike, but they always treated me very well. I never had anybody give me a hard time in Gander about it.”
The family may not have suffered attacks from their neighbours and peers, but Harry certainly did. There were even troubles with the Newfoundland government, Brian Peckford in particular. Peckford was premier of Newfoundlandfrom 1979 to 1989, which, apart from a brief period in 1978, covers the time Harry Steele ran Eastern Provincial Airways and was on the board of CP Air.
Rex Murphy puts it down to a clash of personalities.
“Steele was one of these really independent personalities and some of these strong-arm premiers, and Peckford was in his day, don’t like secondary characters. Steele wasn’t established yet, and this was when everything was fragile. Air Canada was gunning for him too.”
Harry ran a tight ship at EPA, but he knew the airline would never be a big money spinner. “You don’t make money running an airline; you make money when you sell it.”
Harry started his venture with EPA in 1978 as a man with a hotel, a middling-sized stock portfolio, and a mortgage on the family home. He ended with a profit of $20 million in 1982 after just four years. That $20 million went to Newfoundland Capital Corporation, not to Harry personally. It was the seed capital that started Harry Steele and his company on a buying spree over the next decade into even more profitable businesses, first in transportation, then newspapers and radio.
Harry Steele would never look back.